Welcome to the 2014 Oscar Nominations, Where Everyone’s a Winner

It’s a three-picture race among among Gravity, 12 Years and a Slave, and American Hustle.

Left, by Pascal Le Segretain; middle and right, by Jason Merritt. All from Getty Images.

Spielberg started it.

Placed in charge of the jury at Cannes last May, he and his fellow judges decided that the only fair way to recognize this year’s remarkable cinematic richness was to give everybody a little something.

The Palme d’Or, usually awarded to a filmmaker, went instead to Blue Is the Warmest Color director Abdellatif Kechiche and his leading actresses, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Best actress was given to The Past’s Bérénice Bejo, best actor to Nebraska’s Bruce Dern. And Oscar Isaac had to change his plans and fly back to Cannes to accept the Grand Prix on behalf of Joel and Ethan Coen for Inside Llewyn Davis.

The awards picture has changed a lot since then, but one thing remains the same: with so many great films and performances to choose from, voters have no choice but to spread the wealth.

But even those tallies won’t tell the whole story of a remarkably competitive year, where there are very few sure things and more than the usual number of wide-open races.

No category is more competitive, or more confounding to those who earn a living guiding films into the Academy Awards winner’s circle, than best picture. As one consultant told me, “There are 12 legitimate contenders vying for nine spots.” (Technically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can nominate anywhere from 5 to 10 films, but in the two years since that system was introduced it has produced nine nominees each time.)

American Hustle, 12 Years a Slave, and Gravity are all locks, and one of them will almost definitely win best picture. (We may have a good idea which one after the directors’, producers’, and screen actors’ guilds hand out their award over the next two weekends.) But then things get interesting: Blue Jasmine, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska, Philomena, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Wolf of Wall Street all have their backers.

Of that group, perhaps the most interesting case is The Wolf of Wall Street. Passion decides nominations, as voters’ No. 1 choices are weighted far more heavily than any others, so a film like this one—which has inspired fierce feelings in both directions—is likely to benefit. Plus, there is a substantial bloc of voters who will support anything Scorsese does.

A similar dynamic could help Saving Mr. Banks, if only because the Academy’s voting rolls include so many past and present Disney employees.

Philomena, meanwhile, is notable for being Harvey Weinstein’s last real chance to enter the best picture race in a year when his other bets—August: Osage County, Fruitvale Station, and Lee Daniels’ The Butler—just weren’t able to go the distance.

Overall, Oscar insiders say best-picture voters are looking for films with “depth.” But what that means depends on who’s talking. One person I spoke to said The Wolf of Wall Street has depth, because it tackles the problem of rogue bankers, and dismissed Her as superficial. Others think Her tells a uniquely original and compelling story.

Scroll down for a list of predictions.

We already know who will almost definitely win best actress—Blue Jasmine’s Cate Blanchett—but there is drama at the bottom of the column. Sandra Bullock, Judi Dench, and Emma Thompson appear to be safe, but the last slot is a toss-up between American Hustle’s Amy Adams and August: Osage County’s Meryl Streep. Most people I spoke to think Adams will win out, partly because her Golden Globe victory shows that she has momentum and partly because August: Osage County simply hasn’t inspired much enthusiasm.

Best actor, meanwhile, is a six-man horse race featuring Bruce Dern, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hanks, Matthew McConaughey, and Robert Redford, with All Is Lost’s Redford looking increasingly like the odd one out. (Forest Whitaker scored a Screen Actors Guild nod for Lee Daniels’ The Butler, so he’s a possibility too.) Despite good reviews, All Is Lost has made just over $6 million, and Redford’s old-school reserve may not be the best match for today’s full-contact campaign season. (Dern, meanwhile, has campaigned so vigorously since winning at Cannes that Hollywood wags joke that they’ve spotted him on the side of the 405 wearing a sandwich board.)

There is heated debate over whether Oprah Winfrey, an early favorite in the best supporting actress category, can recover from being snubbed at the Golden Globes in favor of Blue Jasmine’s Sally Hawkins. “Oprah walked away from the film,” one consultant told me, referring to the fact that Winfrey, after participating in Q&As timed to the August release of Lee Daniels’ The Butler, mostly recused herself from the endless round of congratulatory events that populate awards season. Those in Winfrey’s camp remain confident that she will be nominated, however, pointing to her vast popularity and the significant favor debts she has amassed as a producer and impresario. There’s also the fact that, as one publicist put it, “Oprah is an easy box to check for the film,” which otherwise has lost much of the awards momentum it had in the summer and fall.

Jared Leto is virtually guaranteed to win best supporting actor for his role as a transsexual with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club, but the rest of the category is remarkably hazy. Captain Phillips’s Barkhad Abdi and American Hustle’s Bradley Cooper seem like good bets, but beyond that it’s hard to say. Will voters plunk down for Michael Fassbender, despite the fact that (a) his character is repulsive and evil and (b) he’s hardly done any campaigning? Will Tom Hanks—of Saving Mr. Banks this time—get nominated in two categories? Will Jonah Hill get to start introducing himself as “twice-nominated Jonah Hill”? Will anyone remember how great Daniel Brühl was in Rush?

Best director is a bit easier to predict, if only because we have the Directors Guild of America Award feature film nominees to guide us. The guild anointed Gravity’s Alfonso Cuarón, Captain Phillips’s Paul Greengrass, 12 Years a Slave’s Steve McQueen, American Hustle’s David O. Russell, and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Martin Scorsese, and that feels like an awfully solid list. Conventional wisdom holds that, as at the Globes, Cuarón will win here, because (a) Gravity is a technical marvel, (b) it needs to win something and isn’t likely to get any acting awards, and (c) because McQueen and Russell, Cuarón's best-picture rivals, are both . . . complicated.

As we travel below the line, some other semi-forgotten gems emerge. Richard Linklater’s gorgeous and troubling Before Midnight should score a best original screenplay nod; Baz Luhrmann’s summer spectacular The Great Gatsby could win best production and costume design; even The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug could make a showing in the technical races.

Steven Spielberg, one suspects, would be proud. Instead of pushing all the chips toward one big winner, the Academy is almost sure to parse them out, one by one. And since, for the studios, awards season is ultimately about money—a “serious” film with Oscar buzz will make a lot more than one without any—that should count as good news for everybody, even if each player would have preferred to win it all.

I’ve come clean with my own predictions—some more educated than others—for some of the higher-profile categories below. Feel free to check back after the nominations are announced to taunt me for being so hilariously wrong, and be sure to visit Vanity Fair’s Hollywood often for more opinionated commentary on this year’s unusually competitive Oscar race.